Chenga

The Ram

The ship swayed and creaked, as it rode the cold waves of the Southern Sea.  Beneath the prow, the battered figurehead, in the shape of a ram, endured the near freezing water and constant assault of the waves.  Atop the mast a lookout peered through the thick fog and his ice-frosted eyelashes.  A dark shape appeared in the mist: a monstrous grey tooth in the heaving jaws of the sea.

'CHENGA!... CAP'N... CHENGA AHOY!'   The lookout's voice hovered in a no man's land between relief and fear.  The journey was at an end, but the ship had to be manoeuvred through the sharp teeth of the shoals and reefs that surrounded Chenga... the Isle of World's End.

A flurry of near frozen men appeared from within the boat and hurried to drop sail.  The sails were heavy and stiff with frost.  Several of the men beat away ice from the spars of the masts and used their body weight to help lower the booms of the sails.  At the helm, a tall black figure held the ship's wheel and peered ahead into the shifting grey mists that hid the dangers of the treacherous seas.

In the hold, the sickening smell of bilge, rats and human waste filled the chill air.  There was no light... just cold... the smell and the constant creaking of the ship.  A hoarse coughing rose above the creaking.

'Nirgalen... just who are you?'  The woman called Eylana looked over at the crumpled pile of rags that cowered in the dark shadows.

'I should ask you the same, old crone.'  Nirgalen looked up and his green eyes strained to see Eylana through the gloom.

'You're no drug runner.'  Eylana moved closer to Nirgalen.

'Have been in my time... been most things somewhere down the line?'  Nirgalen did not want to get into a discussion with the woman, not here... and not now.

'How do you open locks?  And how did you get out of those ropes?'  It seemed that Eylana had been paying close attention to what had happened, as they had journeyed through the caves at the Tomb of Katchu-Pek.

'Ah, now that'd be telling.  You tell me, are you a Peytahn  and just how old are you?'

A smile came to Eylana's face.  'You should know better than to ask a lady her age... and as for being Peytahn, there is Peytahn and human blood within me.'

'Yes, but are you Peytahn?'  To this Eylana said nothing.  Nirgalen decided to change tack.  'How is Simarl?'

'Still breathing, but that cut on his leg... the infection is worsening.'

The two fell back into uneasy silence.  They lay on the rotten wood of the hold, surrounded by a makeshift cage of wood, lashed together with rope.  Nirgalen could have escaped the cage in a heartbeat, but, ironically, the cage was all that lay between them and death.  For, beyond the cage, lay other slaves, for the most part only half human.  In the darkness Nirgalen could see little, but the endless night was filled with sounds and smells that brought many dark memories of his childhood in the streets of Deneb.  A scream, followed by the rattling purr of a Verelag, told the tale of how one of those poor chained souls had come too close to one of the half-human, half-beast creatures from the mountains of Northern K'Vath.

A waft of scent from a Mino-bultai gave further warning.  Stumbling around in the dark was not an option, when you could be speared on a horn, then gored to death.

Nirgalen tried not to imagine what the hold would look like, if they could see just what was out there in the bilge.

The slap of something wet and the squeal of a rat brought back the memories of the backstreets of Deneb, where Shaddan low-lives killed anything that came their way, with a flick of their rasping, poison barbed tongues.